A state appellate court ruled unanimously on Thursday that New York City must keep open 19 schools it wanted to close for poor performance, blocking one of the Bloomberg administration’s signature efforts to improve the educational system.

The ruling, by the Appellate Division, First Department, in Manhattan, upheld a lower court finding that the city’s Education Department did not comply with the 2009 state law on mayoral control of the city schools because it failed to adequately notify the public about the ramifications of the closings.

Because many eighth graders assumed the schools would be closed and the Education Department discouraged them from attending the schools, few applied. Some of the schools could begin September with just a few dozen freshmen. School officials said they expected enrollment to grow with students who move into the city, but the number will still likely be far smaller than in past years.

Since taking office in 2002, the mayor has closed 91 schools that regularly posted low test scores or graduation rates and has replaced them with smaller schools, on the premise that the more intimate environments served struggling students better. Studies have shown that students in the new schools have fared better than their predecessors in the larger schools, but some other large schools have suffered from having to absorb more struggling students.

The 2009 state law that renewed mayoral control of schools required that the city hold public hearings and provide information on the effect of the closings. The city’s teachers’ union and the New York chapter of the N.A.A.C.P. sued the city, claiming that it had not met those requirements.

The appeals court agreed, saying the city’s educational impact statement “merely indicates the number of school seats that will be eliminated” and that the seats “will be recovered through the phase-in of other new schools or through available seats in existing schools.”

The city failed to meet its obligation, the court wrote, “by providing nothing more than boilerplate information about seat availability,” and officials abused the discretion allowed in the law by “limiting the information they provided to the obvious.” The ruling represented a major victory for the union, the United Federation of Teachers.

“No one is above the law, and every court that has looked at this issue has ruled decisively that the Department of Education violated the law when it tried to close these schools,” Michael Mulgrew, the president of the union, said in a statement.

The city is considering whether to try to appeal the decision, and school officials have said they will try again to shut a dozen of the same schools next year. Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said at a news conference Thursday that “what it means is that there is a whole bunch of kids that at least for one year will get a terrible education that they’ll probably never recover from.”

The Education Department is trying to find alternative space for several new schools that were supposed to replace the schools being shut down.

(Source: NY Times)